Robin Ashenden is founder and ex-editor of the Central and Eastern European London Review. His detailed accounts of the media attacks on Lionel Shriver and Toby Young can be read on his substack ‘Letting the Child Run Riot.’
Withnail and I’s Uncle Monty found it crushing to realise that he was never going to be given the part of Hamlet – ‘I shall never play the Dane!’ – for many of us, an equal disappointment is realising, sooner or later, that we’ll probably die uninvited onto Desert Island Discs. This programme has run
In the weeks since Rachel Reeves’s Budget and its shock attack on agricultural property relief, we’ve seen various armchair pundits pontificate on farmers’ lives – a source of mounting exasperation for farmers themselves. The peak of pundit-on-ploughman contempt came, unsurprisingly, from LBC’s James O’Brien First, there have been the panicky announcements from the government –
Finally a date has been set – 29 January 2025 – for the government to debate points posed by the now infamous ‘Call a General Election’ petition. ‘I would like there to be another General Election,’ reads the blurb on the website. ‘I believe the current Labour government have gone back on the promises they
After Donald Trump’s election-win, many junkies of US politics will be needing another fix. But if you’ve already overdosed on Megyn Kelly post-mortems on YouTube or had your fill of Estee Palti’s Kamala imitations, where do you go to head off the pangs till inauguration day next year? Anyone without time for the entire West
Arriving in Blackpool by train is just as I’d always dreamed. At the Pleasure Beach station, I disembarked right by the roller coasters, which rear up like Welsh hills beside you and, with the seagulls, welcome you with shrieking riders and clattering wheels. There are vast coasters in wood and metal weaving in and out
This year, as almost every year, there have been calls for a complete ban on boxing. Two fighters, Ardi Ndembo and Sherif Lawal, have died as a result of the sport since April, with more than twenty meeting the same end in the last decade alone. Steve Bunce, BBC’s ‘voice of boxing’, seemed in a
A consensus seems to be forming, with unreasonable speed, that Kemi Badenoch isn’t exactly smashing it at Prime Minister’s Questions. Much of the harsher criticism comes from expected quarters – ‘Tory Gloom as Gaffe-Prone Kemi Badenoch Endures Another Miserable PMQs’ says a headline in the Huffington Post, while John Crace snarks in the Guardian that
One of the freedoms of later life, if you’re not Keith Richards, is that you no longer have to worry about being cool. Cool, far more than money, is the currency of youth, and as a teenager I knew who had it and who didn’t. But what was cool, all those decades ago? Who possessed
Prior to her election as Conservative Leader at the weekend, Kemi Badenoch was, on numerous occasions, compared to Margaret Thatcher. Simon Heffer, under the headline ‘No Tory has ever reminded me more of Mrs Thatcher than Mrs Badenoch,’ claimed that Kemi was ‘hard-minded, deeply principled, and has Mrs Thatcher’s vital grasp of what Rab Butler
‘Nothing,’ said Vladimir Nabokov, ‘revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it’. If smell is the most evocative of all the senses, it seems that Gen Z’s fabled nostalgia for the 1990s has reached new heights. It isn’t just the fashions and music they’re now spending their money on
Following this weekend’s fraughtly awaited election ‘results’ in Georgia – as important for the country’s direction as any since the end of the Cold War – a potentially explosive situation is developing. While exit polls suggested the Georgian Dream (the incumbent, pro-Kremlin party) would gain no more than 42 per cent to the collective opposition’s
The Shipping Forecast on Radio 4, 100 years old this October, seems to have achieved the impossible. Few people know the places it reports on when it gives the weather conditions in its 31 regions. Almost no one understands the finer points of what it’s telling them – about wind force and direction, atmospheric pressure, or visibility
Next week, a new novel comes out featuring George Smiley, John le Carré’s meek, mild, fiercely intelligent Cold War spymaster. Karla’s Choice will be the tenth book where Smiley plays a central role, yet this time there is a difference. It isn’t le Carré, who died in 2020, telling us the story, but his son Nicholas
Some find happiness through love, some through religion, others through their work or hobbies. But Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has recently revealed that he would be happy living next to a pylon. Following Ken Livingstone’s interest in newts and Jeremy Corbyn’s obsession with manhole covers, it seems prominent Labour politicians are constantly surprising us with
When, after three years of living in Eastern Europe, I came back to the UK, I found myself acutely nostalgic for the post-communist world. Life over there had a charm and directness that London seemed to lack. Luckily, I discovered that even in the capital you can find the best of Eastern Europe all around
No, please no. Not again. Not again! As the Conservatives gear up to choose their next leader, and bookmakers place odds of 6/4 on Robert Jenrick, and just 4-1 for Kemi Badenoch, one has the most awful feeling of déjà vu. The party have already had their Jeremy Corbyn moment in choosing Liz Truss and
A myth seems to be developing about the 1990s. In a recent programme on Disney Plus called In Vogue: The 90s, a series of talking heads rhapsodise about the decade. ‘God, the 90s just changed everything,’ oozes Hamish Bowles, a fashion journalist. ‘It was a great time to be alive, it really felt like a
Is James Bond looking knackered, or is it just me? At 54, I’m at an age where I’ve given up on a lot of things. I lost interest in Question Time when David Dimbleby quit, stopped paying much attention to technology after CDs/DVDs went out, and I’m pretty sure Daniel Craig was my last James
Who honestly has the time or inclination to finish long novels these days? I yearn for a serene period when I can read The Red and the Black or The Raj Quartet each night before bedtime, but I seem to be imagining someone else’s life. When new content, cool and engaging, is flooded onto YouTube
Following the huge success of the 2011 film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – from the book of the same name by John le Carré – there was much talk of a second movie, based on le Carré’s 1979 novel Smiley’s People. The possibility was floated by Tinker Tailor cast member Gary Oldman in 2012 and
